​Justin Panson

This spring I had the chance to travel to Nashville for a reunion with two high school buddies from Pittsburgh. I added a stop in Lexington to see the ponies run at Keeneland, and to hit the bourbon trail. I also spent a night in Louisville at the Seelbach, where Fitzgerald dreamed up his tragic hero Jay Gatsby. On my way out of Louisville there was one other place that tourist guy had to see.

It was a gray rainy morning and I set Google directions to a location on the west side of town, a residential hood some distance from the main tourist areas along the Ohio River. As I drove, the blocks started to get more and more rough, with overgrown empty lots and some of the places in disrepair and falling down. I was thinking ‘where in hell am I going?’ I pulled up at the address and got out. Standing in a steady rain I saw it, a little pink house in a line of houses standing closely beside each other. There were a few bouquets of flowers left on the concrete front porch. I was standing in a puddle reading the historical marker that said this was the house where Muhammad Ali was born and grew up.

I made this side trip because Ali is one of my heroes. My brothers and I grew up watching him fight in what is considered the golden era of heavyweight boxing, with the likes of Joe Frazier, George Foreman and Ken Norton. Those broadcasts on Wide World of Sports featured Howard Cosell with his idiosyncratic fight calls and his entertaining banter with Ali. In the ring Ali was known for his quickness, his ability to dance and jab and take a punch. But he was unique in boxing for his mental game, his trash talk and swagger seemed off the cuff but were really a tactic and a motivational hack.

No fight better exemplifies Ali’s tactical brilliance than the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire when he defeated champion George Foreman to reclaim his title. The fight was orchestrated by outlandish promoter Don King based on a “return to Africa” theme, tapping into the Black Power movement of the time. It featured a carnival-like atmosphere of celebrities and musicians, presided over by the country’s fez-wearing dictator right out of central casting. Forman was a massive dude and a heavy favorite. Ali taunted him for weeks in the run-up and tapped into the local tribal mythologies. During the fight he invented, seemingly on the fly, his “rope-a-dope” strategy of letting the bigger man punch himself out, before finally turning the tables and knocking Foreman out in the 8th. (1)

Ali’s verbal skills, intelligence and independence were a complete break from the lineage of dumb, broke fighters exploited by shady business managers. Because Ali was his own man, an empowered Black man in the 1960s, he was hated by racist America. And that empowerment is the reason he is beloved to this day by millions across the globe.

He is remembered as much as a political figure as an athlete. He refused to enter the draft because he believed the Vietnam war was an imperialist misadventure based on lies. He supported the civil rights movement; and he joined the militant Black Muslim religion. In each case he stood unapologetically for what he believed, regardless of how unpopular that was in the mainstream. The more the racists and war mongers hated him, the better Ali looked. Everybody saw this. His positions on civil rights and the Vietnam war have been validated by history, and these moral stands are a big part of his legacy.

So I was standing there in the drizzle on the sidewalk in front of 3302 Grand Avenue, staring at this little pink house and wondering what went on inside that produced such an extraordinary human being. On this trip I also got to see the log cabin where Abraham Lincoln grew up, and it is not wrong to put these two dwellings in the same conversation. The historical plaque mentions the values that were instilled in a young Cassius Clay by his family. That explanation makes sense in a standard sort of way. But I continue to puzzle with how that one house amid all those other houses could have been such fertile ground out of which grew Ali's greatness.

May 2024

1. When We Were Kings documentary

​My dad had a friend named Roy McHugh who was a sports editor and columnist at the Pittsburgh Press and also wrote for other publications from the late 1950s until his retirement in 1983.  He told me the story of how he was the first guy to interview Cassius Clay after the 1960 Olympic gold medal. He went down to Louisville and arranged the meeting with Clay's trainer Angelo Dundee. The moment he met Clay was pretty memorable.  Read his original article.